Subacute Care

A new form of long term care that just came into the continuum is known as subacute care. I wanted to talk about this because it is kind of hard to understand what it is exactly. It is a specific form of care rendered for very specific reasons. It is inpatient care for acute illnesses, injury or exacerbation of a disease process. A lot of times it is used as recovery from sever procedures or injuries.

I had to have knee surgery two summers ago. It was just for a tear in the meniscus and only a few days after I was able to walk without crutches. I am an avid runner/triathlete though and this surgery leg to many problems. I got muscle imbalances in my legs from overcompensation and had to have physical therapy. It took almost a year to be pain free because I had put off the surgery and the physical therapy so long. While this may have been close to what subacute care does, it’s not. My problem was not that severe, while it did require extensive therapy to go over it. I was never in a state of trauma like the patients of subacute care.

My sister, on the other hand, works as a social worker at a hospital with a Trauma Service. She gets to see all the gory tragedies that happen on a daily basis. She tells me stories of car accidents and all the horrible things that happen to those people. Most people who have had a traumatic injury do not go straight home, but require a lower level of care after their acute care stay in the hospital. This next level of care is often at a subacute facility. The social workers and case managers at my sister’s hospital coordinate the referral and transfer of patients to subacute facilities to continue the patients care when they’re ready to move onto doing more rehabilitation therapy. Subacute facilities help her patients relearn their ambulation, ADL’s, and speech/cognitive abilities.